I’ve had this terra cotta pot under my studio table for just about a year, waiting for the project I wanted to do with it.  Finally, I decided that I needed a pot for some succulents, so now was the time.

I started by coming up with a short phrase to put around the lip. This is really hard for me, despite being a writer, because nothing seems good enough to immortalize in ceramic.  The phrase reads “Let the sun shine, the Earth bursts forth with life!”  I got the letter spacing better this time, because I drew out the length of the circumference of the pot lid on scrap newsprint, and therefore had a rough estimate of the space requirements for each word. I used the french liner raised slip to outline each letter and then began to apply the low fire glaze.

Why do I always forget how *($^%# time consuming those %^$#$%! low fired glazes are?  It probably took me four hours just to glaze the rim, and it’s not even as even as I wanted it.  At least listening to “This American Life” while I paint makes the time pass swiftly.

After I fired the pot, I started to design the tile mosiac.  I used a stencil of art deco  flower designs from a book I’ve had forever and enlarged it for the flower design.  I cut the petals out of clear glass and used acrylic medium to paste some really cool art paper onto the back. After the acrylic dried, I applied more on the back. Then I cut out around the glass with a razor blade.

I laid the flowers down on my sketch of the surface area, and went through the stained glass I had to decide on colors. I have a nice collection of stained glass, but becuase I got them in a bulk purchase from a non-standard location, they’re all opaque hand-made art glass. Ridiculously expensive when you buy it most of the time, but I got an incredible discount. Ironically, I don’t like it much. I prefer cathedral glass.  Still, the blue was nice, and I had several different colors of it that resembled one another, so I cut out chunks. The chunks are about half an inch square.  I cut the stems out of a light green glass.  When I was done, I realized that I needed more to fill the middle area, so I cut out the leaves from dark green glass.

For the bottom, I went through the tiles I’d made earlier. You can see some of them on this site.  I wanted to use the leaf tiles on the flower stems, but they didn’t look right. I have a lot of the circle tiles, not because they work well in the design (I think they’re hard to use) but because they’re easy to make.  I think that looked okay.

I probably spent about eight to ten hours on this project, including mastic and grouting. (It took at least an hour just to clean the grout off the tiles.)  Am I happy with it? No.  It doesn’t look as colorful as I wanted it to.  I think that black grout would have helped. I should have used an opaque glaze on the rim.  The blue squares are too big, and I couldn’t fit them as tightly as I wanted to.  Also, the succulents I bought are in tiny containers, so I put a different plant (a piece of columnular cactus) in there instead.

Still, it holds a plant, so it’s not a complete loss.

I made several small, plain tiles so that I could experiment with wax resist and painterly techniques. I painted this using black underglaze.  My tiles are hand pounded (and rolled) so the consistency isn’t ideal, but that’s kind of the point of hand-made tiles.

This is about four inches square and about a quarter of an inch thick.

This is the last of the batch of mosaic tiles I made in this kiln load. The crawling design on the green tiles is from overfiring.  It is not intentional, but I’m going to pretend that it was.  I have so many of these that at some point I ought to think of a design that would incorporate them. Still not sure what would be the best way to showcase these yet.

The inlay technique has been used to awesome effect for centuries.  You create an incised design in a colored clay body, then add a slip in a contrasting color. When you scrape off the slip, the design underneath comes through in crisp detail.  I have never been able to make it work. For these, I used rubber stamps on Ward’s Red, then used the white cone 06 clay on top of it.  I’m sure I don’t have the right clay consistency, but I haven’t worked out the variables yet.

I saw a picture in a book of a tile mosaic that looked like a carpet made of leaves.  These are difficult in the same way that quilting is difficult–they take precision and a great deal of time.  To make the leaf vein pattern, I used a mulberry leaf.  The shapes are about an inch to an inch and a half long, and I cut them from a hand-rolled slab using a small set of cookie cutters.

These are hand-rolled and cut tiles of 1 1/2 inch in diameter, stamped with commercial rubber stamps, underglazed, and glazed with a low-fire clear.

Here are three of the different colors of tiles I made during this session. The black and yellow ones were underglaze applied to the fired clay, then wiped off to expose the texture. The green ones show the texture because of the ultra-transparent nature of the glaze. I love transparent glazes for the way they let the clay body show through.  If I ever make my own glaze recipes, they will be clear celadon-like colors.

I made these tiles in this shape more because it was convenient to cut them than that they will do well in a mosaic. Actually, I’ve thought it would be really cool if I had cookie cutters in the shapes of tiles like are used in Islamic design. I haven’t yet seen any for sale. May have to make some.

This is “evergreen” on “ward’s red” clay.  This is the first time I’ve had it come out green.  Often it comes out an iron red.  The kiln overfired by quite a bit, so that may have had something to do with it.

With every load, I’ve been adding more small tiles for some unspecified mosaic project in the future.  These I used a glaze I have two bottles of, called “terra cotta.”  How funny–when you put terra cotta glaze on a terra cotta tile, the color looks…terra cotta. I’m not thrilled with them, but I will probably use them.

Cuerda Seca means “dry cord” and refers to using a waxed cord to separate areas of glaze.  I’ve used a waxed beeswax cord before, and it’s not the best tool.  Better is to use wax trailed from a jacquard bottle, especially wax with stain added, wax which has been designed for this purpose. Since this is the first I’ve done it, and the bottle had been sitting on the shelf for a while, I had to mix it with a barbecue skewer. Even so, the first lines came out blotchy, and even the first lines on this tile leaked more wax and solvent oil than I wanted.  I’m not happy with the claws.  I do like the contrast of the black wax against the colored glaze.

Something was odd about the texture of this tile (also purchased already bisqued from a ceramics supplier). It felt already vitreous, and the first layers of glaze felt as if they were beading up and rubbing off.  The green actually did bead up, but I don’t know if that’s from leaked oil solvent or from overfiring.

The original color of this tile is apparent in the circle above the bird’s head.